Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Agile software processes are becoming increasingly more popular due to their promise to ease the formal requirements on programmers and managers, thus accelerating the development, and at the same time maintain adequate quality of the software produced with it. However, agile processes often fall short in two areas: software reuse and process reuse. Software produced with agile processes is not always reusable, because it is not documented very thoroughly. There exist techniques like refactoring that allow programmers to make software elements better understandable, so that they can be reused even though no separate documentation exists on them. However, there are no techniques for process reuse. This is desirable because if a process has parts that can be reused, then it is possible to document these parts and train other employees to use them. This improves the uniformity of the software quality and is usually a good advantage to companies, effectively avoiding to "reinvent the wheel" over and over again. Process reuse is also very important when considering process improvement. When a process is being improved, there is always a documented baseline to start from, which gives a company the ability to measure the increase in efficiency when using a new process as compared to the baseline. This proposal describes the steps to achieve process reuse by automatically discovering usage patterns in a company. This allows processes to be documented and reused automatically, thus making it possible to accrue process documentation during process execution. After a process has concluded, similarities and patterns within the process are automatically presented and can be adopted throughout the company. This also allows one to discover similarities among different processes and make the best of these immediately.